Reading the Short Story

Friday, January 26, 2018

In her speech on receiving the National Book Foundation Medal in 2014, Ursula
Le Guin, who died this past week at the age of 88, scolded publishers for
giving over their responsibility to support good writing and great literature
to the sales department, which often promotes authors as if they were deodorant.
Books ae not just commodities, Le Guin argued, and said that now that she was nearing
the end of her career she did not want to watch American literature get trivialized,
for, she proudly insisted, the name of the beautiful reward writers seek is not
profit, but freedom.

.La Guin called her most famous short story, “The
Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas,” a variation on a theme by William James. In
her introduction to her book The Wind's Twelve Quarters (1975), she
cites the following passage from James's essay "The Moral Philosopher and
the Moral Life" as the ideological source of the story:

[If] the hypothesis were offered us of a
world in which Messrs. Fourier's and Bellamy's and Morris's utopias should all
be outdone, and millions kept permanently happy on the one simple condition
that a certain lost soul on the far-off edge of things should lead a life of
lonely torment, what except a specific and independent sort of emotion can it
be which would make us immediately feel, even though an impulse arose within us
to clutch at the happiness so offered, how hideous a thing would be its
enjoyment when deliberately accepted as the fruit of such a bargain."

Indeed, the
story is geometrically neat in its exploration of the nature of human
happiness. The first half presents the familiar convention in science fiction
and fantasy of the futuristic utopia.

However, the
narrator, aware of the perfect utopian nature of Omelas and of the human
skepticism about such complete happiness, chides readers for the bad habit,
encouraged by sophisticates and pedants, of considering happiness as something
rather stupid and only evil interesting.To belie these very words, the story inevitably reaches a point at which
the narrator says that if we do not believe the joy of the beautiful city, then
one more thing must be described.At
this point, the narrator shifts to a description of the hidden child, which is,
as Collins suggests, the classic image of the scapegoat.The magic of the scapegoat depends on the
willingness of the people to rationalize the existence of evil as something
that exists outside of themselves, for which they have no responsibility.

The people of
Omelas are not happy because they are ignorant of the child, but precisely
because they are aware of it.The ones
who leave Omelas may be the weaker ones because they cannot live with the
knowledge of evil, and thus they leave for some place where they think there is
no evil.As the narrator says, such a place
may not even exist.

Changing Planes, one of
her last books, before she decided that her fiction inspiration had dried up,is a classic example of the “what if” school of literary creation. “What
if” you took the most tedious hiatus of modern life—the mind-numbing wait in an
airport between changing planes—and transformed it into a marvelous opportunity
to change planes of reality?

After a brief introduction describing the method of one Sita Dulip of
Cincinnati, who discovered that by an imaginative twist she could go anywhere
“because she was already between planes,” Le Guin “what ifs’ her way through
fifteen Gulliverian and Borgesian explorations of “interplanary travel.”

Although these playful pieces make no pretense to the biting satire of
Jonathan Swift or the profound epistemology of Jorge Borges, Le Guin seems to
have great fun here puncturing some of the pretenses of modern society and
examining some of the paradoxes of the human condition. Among the Swiftian
satires are stories about the Veksi, a species of angry people whose social
life consists of arguments, fights, sulks, brawls, feuds, and acts of
vengeance; the Ansarac, a migratory race whose elegant birdlike beauty is
intolerable to more “civilized” planes; and the Hegns, all of whom are members
of a Royal Family.

The Borgesian explorations include tales of the Asonu, a profound
people who have no language because transcendent knowledge cannot be expressed
in language; the Hennebet who, because they make no split between body and
spirit, have no need for religion, dogma, or formulated metaphysics; and the
Frin who all dream the same dreams and thus experience a true communal bonding.

This “what if” method of creation, although sometimes satirically
scintillating and occasionally philosophically profound, runs the risk of every
so often becoming merely sophomorically silly. For example, if there is an
actual Easter Island and an actual Christmas Island, “what if” there were a
Halloween Island, a July Fourth Island, a New Year’s Island, etc.? And what
about Wake Island?What would life and
reality itself be like if there were a people who never slept at all?Would they all be geniuses because they did
not waste time in idle slumber, or would they only be able to live in mundane
fact because the way to truth is through lies and dreams?

The great nineteenth-century poet and thinker Samuel Taylor Coleridge
once made an important distinction between Fancy and Imagination.Creative products of Fancy, he suggested, are
clever composites of disparate things that may amuse and edify, but creations
of the imagination are genuinely new entities that exceed the mere sum of their
parts. Although Ursula K. Le Guin has succeeded in the past in creating
provocative works of true imagination, in Changing Planes she is mostly
just having some fanciful fun.These are
not masterful satires that will alter your view of society, nor are they
profound parables that will change your notion of what reality is.But they are amusing “what ifs” with which you
can pleasantly pass some stale time while you are waiting to change planes in
an airport, which Le Guin describes as a “nonplace in which time does not pass
and there is no hope of any meaningful existence.”

Ursula Le Guin, thank you for the profound sense of a meaningful existence
you gave us.We will miss you.

Friday, December 8, 2017

I was sorry to hear of the death
of William H. Gass this week. He has been America's most important
philosophical novelist, not in the discursive sense by which we identify other
novelists with a freight of ideology to illustrate, but rather as a philosopher
of language who is also a powerful fiction-maker with the courage of his
convictions.

In his fourth collection of
essays, Finding a Form (1996), Gass remains one of the last unashamed
advocates for the great Greek ideal of form, exploring with the precision
usually reserved for poetry, the relationship between language and mind and the
tension between nature and culture. His
every sentence carefully carved, Gass is the best example of his own belief
that there is music in prose and that language must be carefully crafted so
that it can be heard. Throughout the
book, Gass returns untiringly to his central conviction--that the artist's
fundamental loyalty is to form, not ideology or content. "Every other diddly desire can find
expression; every crackpot idea or local obsession, every bias and graciousness
and mark of malice, may have an hour," says Gass, "but it must never
be allowed to carry the day."

Gass has been singing this song
since his first collection of essays, Fiction and the Figures of Life
(1970), in which he established his primary premise about fiction: "that
stories and the places and people in them are merely made of words as chairs
are made of smoothed sticks and sometimes of cloth and metal tubes."His formalist conviction that a novel or short
story is ideally a self-contained meaning system is his most controversial
principle, one that he explores with equal fervor in his other two collections
of essays, The World Within the Word (1978) and Habitations of the
Word (1985).

Gass's first novel, Omensetter's
Luck (1966), was met with almost overwhelming critical success. Reviewers praised its lyrical beauty and its
intellectual depth, calling it an important contribution to the literature of
its time, even the most important work of fiction by an American writer of its
generation. The plot of the novel is
simple, for Gass has never been interested in mere plot. It deals with an old man who tries to tell
about Omensetter, a craftsman who settled in a Ohio town in the late nineteenth
century. However, this voice is less
important than the voice of the Reverend Jethro Furber, Omensetter's
antagonist. A parody of folk legend, the
novel is about how to represent the world in words, the theme of all of Gass's
fiction. A verbal duel between the two
main characters, it explores basic philosophic conflicts between mind and body,
human and object, reason and feeling.

Two years later, Gass published
his second work of fiction, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country,
containing a novella, The Pedersen Kid, a hallucinatory detective story
and quest romance about coming of age in the midst of madness and death, and
four short stories.Gass has said that
the best of these pieces is "Order of Insects," a story about a woman
who limits her vision so obsessively that she transforms insects into
metaphoric, mythic, creatures.Her
fascination with the insects centers on their order and wholeness in death,
for, unlike humans, their skeletons are on the outside; thus they retain their
form.Never seeming to decay, they are
perfect geometric shapes of pure order.

The best-known story in the
collection is the title story, a lyrical meditation of thirty-two sections,
that, in between its Yeatsean beginning--"I have sailed the seas and
come...to B...a small...town fastened to a field in Indiana"--and its
transcendent conclusion of "Joy to the World" explores the narrator's
efforts to pull himself together poetically after a failed affair that makes
him feel he has "love left over" that he would like to lose. The story has become a classic anthology
piece, a representative of experimental short fiction of the 1960s, often
placed alongside the stories of Donald Barthelme, John Barth, and Robert Coover
to illustrate the self-reflexivity of post-modernism.

Gass's most thoroughly experimental,
self-reflexive fiction, however, is his novella Willie Master's Lonesome
Wife (1968), a work that seeks to create the illusion that the book the
reader holds in his hands is indeed the lonesome wife herself and that the
reading process is a sexual encounter--a metaphor Gass calls our attention to
by using different paper textures, photographs, and a variety of typographical
devices to suggest that words are sensuous objects that must be encountered
concretely and not merely transparent lens through which we perceive
"reality."

The Tunnel, Gass's master work, on which he
labored for twenty-five years, creates the voice of William Frederick Kohler, a
history professor, who while trying to write a simple, self-congratulatory
preface to his own magnum opus, Guilt and Innocence in Hitler's Germany,
becomes blocked and writes about his own life instead. Filled with bitterness, hatred, lies,
self-pity, and self-indulgence, Kohler resents his hard-fisted father and his
self-pitying mother, loathes his fat, slothful wife, and has nothing but
contempt for his nondescript adolescent sons, his pedantic colleagues, and his
superficial lovers. However, in spite of
such an abhorrent personality, because the voice of Kohler is expressed in
Gass's highly polished prose, wonderfully sustained for over six hundred pages,
the novel is not a self-indulgent diatribe, but a complex philosophic
exploration of the relationship between historical fascism and domestic
solipsism.

William H. Gass has been the most
articulate and forceful contemporary proponent of the importance of aesthetic
beauty and artistic structure, even as critics and writers around him have
caved in to reading literature as a carrier of social message.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

The
National Book Foundation has just announced that it will award Annie Proulx the Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American
Letters--a $10,000 prize--at the 68th National Book Awards Ceremony
and Benefit Dinner on Wednesday, November 15, 2017. I have always admired
Proulx’s short stories. Here are some comments about her three “Wyoming Stories”
collections:

Close
Range: Wyoming Stories 1

In Close Range: Wyoming
Stories, Proulx focuses on the rural west, where her characters are ragged
and rugged, but where, either because of her increased confidence as a writer
or because she was inspired by the landscape and the fiercely independent
populace, are compellingly caught in a world that is both grittily real and
magically mythical at once. Claiming
that her stories gainsay the romantic myth of the West, Proulx admires the
independence and self-reliance she has found there, noting that the people
"fix things and get along without them if they can't be fixed. They don't
whine."

Place is as important as the
people who populate it in Close Range, for the Wyoming landscape is
harsh yet beautiful, real yet magical, deadly yet sustaining. In such a world, social props are worthless
and folks are thrown back on their most basic instincts, whether they be
sexual, survival, or sacred. In such a
world, as one character says in "Brokeback Mountain," "it's
easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse." Annie Proulx's
Wyoming is a heart of darkness inherent in place and personality at once.

The most remarkable thing about
"Brokeback Mountain" is that although it is about a sexual
relationship between two men, it cannot be categorized as a homosexual story;
it is rather a tragic love story that simply happens to involve two males. The
fact that the men are Wyoming cowboys rather than San Francisco urbanites makes
Proulx's success in creating such a convincing and emotionally affecting story
all the more wonderful.

Jack Twist and Ennis del Mar are
"high-school drop-out country boys with no prospects" who, while
working alone on a sheep-herding operation on Brokeback Mountain, abruptly and
silently, engage in a sexual encounter, after which both immediately insist,
"I'm not no queer." Although
the two get married and do not see each other for four years, when they meet
again, they grab each other and hug in a gruff masculine way, and then,
"as easily as the right key turns the lock tumblers, their mouths came
together."

Neither have sex with other men,
and both know the danger of their relationship.
Twenty years pass, and their infrequent encounters are combination of
sexual passion and personal concern. The
story comes to a climax when Jack, who unsuccessfully tries to convince Ennis
they can make a life together, is mysterious killed on the roadside. Although officially it was an accident, Ennis
sorrowfully suspects that Jack has been murdered after approaching another
man. Although "Brokeback
Mountain" ends with Jack a victim of social homophobia, this is not a
story about the social plight of the homosexual. The issues Proulx explores here are more
basic and primal than that. Told in a
straightforward, matter-of-fact style, the story elicits a genuine sympathy for
a love that is utterly convincing.

Chosen by John Updike for The
Best American Short Stories of the Century, "The Half-Skinned
Steer" creates an hallucinatory world of shimmering significance out of
common materials. The simple event on
which the story is based is a cross-country drive made by Mero, a man in his
eighties, to Wyoming for the funeral of his brother. The story alternates between the old man's
encounters on the road, including an accident, and his memories of his father
and brother. The central metaphor of the
piece is introduced in a story Mero recalls about a man who, while skinning a
steer, stops for dinner, leaving the beast half skinned. When he returns, he sees the steer stumbling
stiffly away, its head and shoulders raw meat, its staring eyes filled with
hate. The man knows that he and his family are done for.

The story ends with Mero getting
stuck in a snow storm a few miles away from his destination and trying to walk
back to the main highway. As he
struggles through the wind and the drifts, he notices that one of the herd of
cattle in the field next to the road has been keeping pace with him, and he
realizes that the "half-skinned steer's red eye had been watching for him
all this time." In its combination of stark realism and folktale myth,
"The Half-Skinned Steer" is reminiscent of stories by Eudora Welty
and Flannery O'Connor, for Mero's journey is an archetypal one toward the
inevitable destiny of death.

Annie Proulx has said that
"The Mud Below" is her favorite story in Close Range, for
"on-the-edge situations" and the rodeo interest her. The title refers to the mud of the rodeo
arena, and the main character is twenty-three-year-old Diamond Felts, who, at
five feet three has always been called Shorty, Kid, Tiny, and Little Guy. His father left when he was a child, telling
him, "You ain't no kid of mine."
His mother taunts him about his size more than anyone else, always
calling him Shorty and telling him he is stupid for wanting to be a bull rider
in the rodeo.

The force of the story comes from
Diamond's identification with the bulls.
The first time he rides one he gets such a feeling of power that he
feels as though he were the bull and not the rider; even the fright seems to
fulfill a "greedy physical hunger" in him. When one man tells him that the bull is not
supposed to be his role model, Diamond says the bull is his partner.

The story comes to a climax when
Diamond is thrown and suffers a dislocated shoulder. Tormented by the pain, he calls his mother
and demands to know who his father is. Getting no answer, Diamond drives away
thinking that all of life is a "hard, fast ride that ended in the
mud," but he also feels the euphoric heat of the bull ride, or at least
the memory of it, and realizes that if that is all there is, it must be enough.

Like most of the stories in Close
Range: Wyoming Stories, "The Bunchgrass Edge of the World" is
about surviving. As Old Red, the ninety-six-year-old grandfather says at the
end, "The main thing in life was staying power. That was it: stand around long enough, you'd
get to sit down." Picked by Amy Tan
to be included in the 1999 The Best American Short Stories, it is one of
the most comic fictions in the collection.
A story about a young woman named Ottaline, with a "physique
approaching the size of a propane tank," being wooed by a broken-down John
Deere 4030 tractor could hardly be anything else.

Ottaline's only chance for a
husband seems to be the semiliterate hired man, Hal Bloom, with whom she has
silent sex, that is, until she is first approached by the talking tractor, who
calls her "sweetheart, lady-girl."
Tired of the loneliness of listening to cell phone conversations on a
scanner, Ottaline spends more and more time with the tractor, gaining
confidence until, when made to take on a cattle trading responsibility by her
ill father, she meets Flyby Amendinger, who she soon marries. The story ends
with Ottaline's father getting killed in a small plane he is flying. The ninety-six-year old grandfather, who sees
how things had to go, has the powerfully uncomplicated final word--that the
main thing in life is staying power.

Bad
Dirt: Wyoming Stories 2.

In Close Range: Wyoming
Stories, one of Annie Proulx’s narrators says ominously, “Friend, it’s
easier than you think to yield up to the dark impulse.” Well, if that book
painted the desperate side of rural big sky life, then Bad Dirt: Wyoming
Stories 2 is largely a light-hearted companion volume. Made up of six very
brief tall-tales and five longer stories, Bad Dirt (which refers to
rough country roads)is, by and large, a snort-out-loud hoot.

Most of the action takes place in
and around Elk Tooth, Wyoming, pop. 80, only worth visiting for three bars, the
most popular of which is Pee Wee’s, where such stories are best told and most
enjoyed. Take for example “The Trickle
Down Effect,” in which Fiesta Punch, one of the area’s many desperate women
ranchers, hires Deb Sipple to drive to Wisconsin to pick up some hay. But Deb stops for too many drinks and tosses
too many cigarettes out the window on the way back. When he rolls into Elk Tooth late at night,
it is the closest thing to a meteor the folks have ever seen.

And what about “Summer of the Hot
Tubs”? When Amanda Gribb, who tends bar
at Pee Wee’s, hears about Willy Huson’s using an enormous cast-iron cooking pot
for a hot tub, she grabs some frozen corn and a can of chili powder, declaring,
“If he’s goin cook hisself let’s get some flavor in there.” Then there’s “The Hellhole,” in which Game
Warden Creel Zmundzinski’s contempt for poachers is made clear by a fiery
fissure that opens up under the obnoxious culprits he catches.

Although the longer stories are
somewhat more culturally complex, they still have a wry, tongue-in-cheek tone.
In “What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?” Gilbert Wolfscale, born and
raised on the family ranch, is “caught in the downward ranching spiral of too
much work, not enough money, drought.” His wife leaves him and his two boys
want nothing to do with him. But he has
a “scalding passion” for the ranch. He knows exactly what kind of furniture
Jesus would pick if he owned a place in Wyoming.

In “The Indian Wars Refought,”
Charlie Parrott, a reservation Sioux, marries the widow Georgina Brawls, and
his 20-something daughter Linney, a real hellcat, comes to live with them. In the process of cleaning up an old commercial
building, she finds letters from Buffalo Bill Cody about making a movie of the
battle at Wounded Knee and becomes suddenly fired up on learning of the
massacre of her people. In “Man Crawling Out of Trees,” when Mitchell Fair and
his wife Eugenie retire from the East to Wyoming, he buys an old pickup truck
and drives around the prairie on his own.
She gets more and more lonely, until a man crawls toward her out of the
woods and she breaks the cardinal rule of the country.

In “The Wamsutter Wolf,” Buddy
Millar moves right next door to Cheri, an overweight hellcat from high school,
and the bully who once broke his nose. Well, things just go from bad to worse,
culminating with Cheri sneaking over to Buddy’s trailer and climbing into bed,
late night runs to the emergency room, fear of jealous reprisals, guns at the
ready, and so on and so. But it is not just the imaginative plots and the
cantankerous characters that make these stories so irresistible; it’s the
rhythm of the prose and the tone of the teller. Proulx is a tough, smart lady
who doesn’t miss very much. And she’s
flat-out funny.

Fine
Just the Way It Is: Wyoming Stories 3.

Annie Proulx bookends the third
volume of her “Wyoming Stories” series by citing the book’s title in the first
and last tale, thus locating them in time and space.

In “Family Man,” Ray Forkenbrock,
wasting away in a home for the elderly, tells his granddaughter about his past,
which she records for posterity. Even
though his life was marred by hardship and a secret betrayal by his father, he
is adamant that “everything was fine the way it was.” In the heart-scalding
final story, “Tits Up in a Ditch,” which focuses on Dakota Lister, who loses
more than her arm while serving in Iraq, her grandmother’s husband Verl dismisses
outsider criticism of the state by insisting that “Wyomin is fine just the way
it is.”

The way it was, and often still
is, is vicious. The five strongest pieces are better characterized by the title
of the final story, which refers to a cow that tried to climb up a deep slope
and slid back down in the ditch and died. Whether the story takes place in the
late 19th century or the early 21st, one slip-up in the
rugged outback of Wyoming can kill you. In “Them Old Cowboy Songs,” Archie and
Rose try to make a go of it on a modest homestead. However, the winters are
bitter and jobs are few and Archie’s decision to leave pregnant Rose in their
rough-hewn little house to find work results in disaster.

In “Testimony of the Monkey,” a
silly argument over whether to wash the lettuce splits up Marc and Catlin, two
rugged outdoors enthusiasts. When in
anger and spite, she takes an ill-advised trip into harsh territory alone and
catches her foot in the crevice of a rock, the rest of the story, which
alternates between her painful efforts to free herself and her hallucinations
about rescue, is predictable, but none the less agonizing.

Proulx indulges herself here in a
couple of playful fables about the devil in “I’ve Always Loved This Place” and
“Swamp Mischief” and a couple of more serious legends about a Bermuda Triangle
sagebrush and an early Indian buffalo hunt in “The Sagebrush Kid” and “Deep-Blood-Greasy-Bowl.”

However, the most powerful
stories are those that reverberate on the final page of the collection when
Dakota Lester tells the parents of her husband, who has lost both legs and half
his face in Iraq, “Sash is tits up in a ditch.” And so are they all in this
scrupulously written Annie Proulx collection.

Congratulations to Annie
Proulx on her newest honor, which she will add to her Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, National Book Award, and PEN/Faulkner
Award for Fiction.

Tuesday, September 19, 2017

One might very well respond to the question that heads this commentary,
“Who cares?” “What difference does it make?”

I can only say that, having very carefully read thousands of stories
throughout my career, I guess certain expectations come into play when I read
what someone has labelled a “short story.”

The following four pieces have been labelled “short stories,” but for
reasons I will try to explain, they do not seem like short stories to me. They
may be well written pieces of prose that I enjoyed reading, just not short
stories. Does that make any difference?
I think so. It makes a difference in how I read them.

Courttia Newland, “Reversible”

The first two paragraphs of this story depict a sadly familiar picture—a
black man has been shot by police and a protesting crowd gathers around his
body while the police stand by with guns ready. The first sentence of the third
paragraph shifts this realistic picture into the literary: “The blood beneath
the body slows to a trickle and stops. It makes a slow return inwards.” And we suddenly realize that this is a clever
piece of prose that reverses reality. The body begins to stir, then lifts, and
the fallen baseball cap flips from the ground onto the man’s head. Then we see the shooting in reverse: “Tiny
black dots leap from his chest like fleas. Three plumes of fire are sucked into
the rifle barrel.”

Then we watch the man backing into his car, the wheels turning
counterclockwise, listening to a tune on the radio he does not recognize (for
it plays in reverse?), and entering his house (walking backward, we assume),
being greeted with a hug by his mother, throwing his jacket on a chair, and
sitting down.

Knowing that we are witnessing an act in reverse that cannot be reversed,
we may be interested in the cleverness of the technique and be horrified by an
act we read about in the newspapers every so often, but I am not sure that we
can do both at the same time. The story spends so much energy maintaining, not
always successfully, the reversing technique that the reader, while trying to
visualize the technique, may lose empathy with the human character.

James Kelman, “Words and Things
to Sip”

James Kelman may be the most familiar writer in this collection; at
least he is to me. I posted a blog essay on his short stories a while back,
after having read Busted Scotch and The Good Times. Most critics have argued that Kelman is a
better short story writer than novelist, and Kelman himself once told an
interviewer that if critics looked at his short stories they would not be
asking him questions about his novels.

However, I am not sure Kelman is writing a short story in “Words and
Things to Sip,” the title of which seems to reflect its technique—that it is
less a story than a rambling monologue by a man waiting in a bar for his female
friend, a man who passes this time by thinking about, and at some point
transcribing, whatever comes to his mind.
This kind of stream of
consciousness can be effective in a novel, if the writing is good enough, but
it does not necessarily make for an effective short story. Joyce did it very
well in Ulysses but did not attempt
it in Dubliners.

Kelman pretty much just writes about whatever comes to mind; for
example, when he mentions a newspaper named “something Planet,” he is reminded of Superman at the Daily Planet with Clark Kent and the irascible editor, what was his
name, who knows, who cares, Perry Mason or some damn thing.

Sometimes the voice we hear ruminates on ideas, e.g. “The only reliable
method of knowledge is literature,” opining that we cannot trust “internetual
information.” At one point the voice
thinks, “Life is strange. Context is all. Without context where would we be?
Where would the world be? This question is the most real.”

When the narrator’s female friend finally arrives, he thinks “The whole
of life was too good to be true and I was the luckiest man in the whole world
and that is the God’s truth so help me my Lord God, the one bright star in the
dismal night sky.”

A lot of this is interesting thinking and good talk, but I am not sure
we would tolerate it if it were not talk by James Kelman, for after all, it is
less a story than just a lot of blather.

David Rose, “Ariel”

I also know the work of David Rose. I wrote a blog essay about his
story “Flora,” which appeared in the 2011 volume of Best British Short Stories and immediately ordered a copy of his collection
Posthumous Stories. I thought “Flora”
was the epitome of what makes the short story so fascinating to me.

However, I am not so sure that “Ariel” is a short story, although the
writing is very fine. I have no idea if the young male narrator in this story
is a persona for Rose himself or if the
young man named Keith he so admires, who owns a white Ariel motor-bike, was an
actual person that Rose knew when he was sixteen. But this piece reads more like a brief memoir
than a short story. Nothing really happens in it; it seems to have no
significant meaning. It ends with the narrator getting married and buying a
house--what he calls a “very ordinary story”--and mentioning a story far from
ordinary, albeit clichéd, of his heroic model getting killed in a car accident.

The writing is good, but it just does not seem to be a story.

Deirdre Shanahan, “The Wind
Calling”

This piece has more context than Rose’s piece, but still, it seems less
a story than a memory—this time the persona is a young woman who is strongly
attracted to a young man named Colum Brady, with whom she has her first sexual
encounter. She has a brother two years younger than she named Jem, who simply
disappears one day. Years later she runs into Colum and asks him if he knows
what happened to her brother Jem. Colum tells her that Jem had seen them having
sex and threatened to tell her father if he is not given money for whiskey, but
Colum tells him to “head off.” And that
is the last he saw of him.

I have read this piece several times, looking for the story in it, but
I am just not sure there is one. It is a
memory of childhood, much of it spent on the road, and an account of the woman’s
father and siblings disappearing, but the story of her first sexual encounter,
which seems one important event in the
piece, does not seem to be meaningfully connected with the other important even—the disappearance of her
brother. It is a piece about things that
happen, but the things that happen do not cohere into a story.

I suppose a story can be anything a writer wants to make it, but if it
does not meaningfully hold together, the reader does not respond to it as a
story—just an interesting piece of prose.

Wednesday, September 13, 2017

Perhaps because they are usually based on the mimetic notion of a “mirror
in the roadway” reflecting the “real” world, realistic stories often seem to
have some “ripped from the headlines” social issue embedded in them. Vesna Main’s
story “Safe” focuses on a young woman who finally rebels against being abused
by an exploitative boyfriend and stabs him while he is deep in a drunken sleep.
The boyfriend has compelled her into doing a strip for two of his
acquaintances, who pull her clothes off and rape her.

This is a realistic story—no symbolic language or transition into a
magical realism world. The only metaphoric language focuses on the notion of
some “force” that takes over the woman and compels her to stab the boyfriend: “Her
hand moved as if someone was directing it, pushing it with a long stick as if
she were a puppet.” After she has killed the boyfriend, the “force” releases go
of her and she is “safe.”

While she is in a holding cell, her lawyer keeps asking why she did not
just leave, suggesting a common view that she was “asking for it.” The lawyer
says her best defense is to present herself as a confused young woman who
killed her violent boyfriend in self-defense. The focus of the story is on the “force,”
although it is not clear what that force is, other than a kind of just rebellion against male domination of
women.

Sophie Wellstood, “The First
Hard Rain”

After a first reading of this story, you are apt to say, “There’s
nothing going on here.” After a second
reading you are apt to say, “There’s something going on here, but I’m not sure
what it is.”

Nothing much suggested by the first scene, in which the central
character Rachael, accompanies her ex-husband Peter and Peter’s mother Val to
dump the ashes of her father-in-law Terry over the M6 because it was his
favourite motorway.

The second scene takes place at the King’s Head Hotel where the three
go for drinks, where we learn from the waitress Lorrelle that the
father-in-law, Terry Hastings, was a teacher and that her niece was one of his
pupils. Lorrelle says she recognizes
Terry’s wife from her picture in the
papers and refers to as a “poor cow.” Why the wife’s picture was in the newspaper
is not clear. However, something seems to be suggested by Lorrelle’s comment
that the niece “passed first time. Surprise surprise.” We can only guess that
Terry has had sex with the niece and
that he has been arrested.

After Peter and Val leave, Rachael stays to have a drink with Lorrelle
and asks her, “Your niece, how is she now?” After a paragraph describing seagulls over the landfill, “rising and
dipping crazily in their unknowable world,” Lorrelle takes a deep drag of her
cigarette and lets the smoke leave her mouth and nostrils “like a ghost leaving
her body.” She replies, “She’ll be OK. You know. She’s going to go back to
college. She’ll be OK.”: Rachael sees tears on Lorrelle’s eyelashes.

The only metaphoric context for the story is introduced in the first
paragraph. And concludes the story. Rachael thinks a tempest of Biblical proportions has occurred over the
Irish sea, causing a flock of hundreds of seagulls to be driven miles inland,
making her doubt if they can ever find their way back to “their desolate ocean
home.” But then she thinks the real reason for the screeching was “unromantic
and mundane”—it is the city’s landfill and the gulls are swooping over hillocks
of human waste.

Short stories often are reluctant to provide explanatory information or
background context for their mysteries, but usually there is a reason for such
reticence. I am just not sure that there
is any reason in “The First Hard Rain” for leaving out story information that actually makes this a
story.

Giselle Leeb, “As You Follow”

In this second person story, the focus is on the narrator at an
Octoberfest celebration in London, who cannot keep his eyes off a young
blue-eyed, blond-haired boy who he thinks is too young to be there—a boy who, dressed
like the men, is happy, happy, pure joy.

The narrator feels he is in a magic place and recalls when he was young
and the world was pure, full of “beauty
and truth.” The narrator thinks he is young again, at his first wedding, and he
cannot believe that this life he has waited for all those years when he was
growing up has finally arrived.

At the end of the story, he looks into the river Thames and cannot take
his eyes off his own reflection, a boy in shirt sleeves, “bursting with pride
and with joy.” The narrator follows the
boy, that is, his reflection into the water, and as he reaches for the light
above his head, a small hand drags him into the darkness of the water and as he
is pulled down as the waves whisper and move on.

This story begins realistically, but the Octoberfest creates a magical
context that moves the narrator from reality into an identification with the
boy and a return to his own past, until he becomes the boy/man and is drawn Narcissus-like
into his own reflection. The reader is not given any explanation for the events
in this story, but the context of a magical, metaphoric world is so pervasive
and the identification between the narrator and the boy is so emphatic that the
reader is ready to accept the Narcissistic fall into the self at the end.

Francoise Harvey, “Never Thought
He’d Go”

The question that preoccupies this story is announced in the first few
lines. A boy named Norm has been found at the edge of a graveyard with a broken
arm, three broken ribs, a black eye, a broken collarbone and lots of bruises. Three
friends have three different theories about what happened to him: He fell off
the church spire says Davi, a gravestone fell on him says Davitoo, he was trampled
by cows says Saz. The question of what Norm was doing in the church at night is
more easily answered: his friends have dared him to do it. The title comes from
the narrator’s notion that none of them ever thought Norm would do it, since
they warned him the church was haunted.

Made uneasy by guilt, the narrator cannot sleep and sees a light
flashing from the church bell tower. “Flash and gone. Flash and gone.” And then
“Flash and hold” as if the light had spotted him. All members of the “gang”
have seen the light and agree to meet at midnight in the cemetery, although now
they worry it will be Norm’s ghost who shows up for revenge. Then Davitoo is
found just as Norm was--with a broken
wrist, jaw, two broken ribs, a broken nose, and lots of bruises. The story ends
with the mystery of what happened to the two boys still unsolved and the light
in the church going flash and gone, flash and gone, until it stays on.

Is this a story about kids involved
in pranks or a supernatural story in which the church really is haunted? In either case, the injuries of the two boys
are never motivated in any meaningful way. How did they happen? Why did they happen? What is the point of this story?

Daisy Johnson, “Language”

“Language” is from Johnson’s book Fen
which has received good reviews both in England and America. The stories are fantasy/reality stories of
the kind that American writer Karen Russell got a lot of buzz for a few years
ago, although they do not have the self-consciously flippant language of
Russell’s stories.

“Language” opens as a kind of female sexual initiation story focusing
on Nora Marlow Carr, at age sixteen, a big girl, perhaps a bit overweight, with
childbearing hips and milk-carrying breasts, a “natural woman,” or what some
called big boned, in love with a big guy named Harrow Williams. Nora is a kind
of a nerd, smart in the ways of math and string theory; Harrow not so much.

Nora seduces Harrow into sex and convinces him they are “entangled.” They
get married and she says she wishes someone had told her what a messy affair living with a man was. Then abruptly Harrow
dies and Nora takes care of his mother, who, it seems knows a bit of magic and
manages to bring Harrow back from the dead.

The final gimmick of the story is that when Harrow speaks, he creates a
physical pain in Nora and Sarah. For example, a single syllable can cause Sarah
to vomit, while a sentence an cause her to have nosebleeds.

Nora tries to fix this by having Harrow try out different words to see
what effect they have. Some of her attempts to “cure” Harrow are religious in nature,
others are linguistic, but nothing seems to work. It reaches a point when even
Harrow’s thoughts cause Nora and Sarah physical pain. The story ends with this
sentence: “And though there were someone else’s thoughts hooked and barbed inside
her, she saw the dark passage of where she was going: not a rescue at all, only
a stripping away, a cursing back into nothing.”

The problem of the story is that there is no causal or metaphoric
connection between the female initiation theme at the beginning and the return to life zombie story at the end. Even
more important, there is no meaningful connection between language and physical harm.

Johnson has said in an interview that the Fen, where her stories take
place, is a liminal landscape with one foot in water an d one on earth, which
seems to “resonate” with certain themes in the stories, such as the “fluid
boundaries between myth and reality.” However, if we are to accept a merging of
reality and myth, there should be some justification—not simply that it
meaninglessly occurs.

Claire Dean, “Is-and”

Once again, we begin with a realistic story: a woman goes with her recent husband to visit
his mother who lives on an island. Nothing much happens; he seems a taciturn
lout and she is lonely. The house is haunted by the memory of the man’s first
wife.

The story seems to center around a mysterious package that the postman
brings the husband, although it does not have his name on it. The wife opens
the package, which contains a baby board book of nursery rhymes with panels a
child can push to play different tunes, e.g. “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” “Mary
Had a Little Lamb,” “Three Blind Mice,” etc.

Significantly, some letters have been blacked out in the book, e.g.

w…e…w…a…n…t…t…o…c…o…m…h…o…m…e

It seems clear that the missing letters are not important, but that the
remaining letters spell out: “We want to come home.”

The wife goes to a bookstore and talks to the owner about stories with
blacked out letters, and he tells her about the lhiannan shee, an undead
vampire female who is drawn to bards.

The story ends with the husband leaving the house, the mother whipping
up broken eggshells, and the wife hearing someone whistling the tune she heard
from the book the first time she opened it.
She turns to yell at him, but “everything within her stopped. The
stranger held her there with his gaze. She took his outstretched hand and let
him lead her away.”

The realistic first part of the story does not lead to the unrealistic
last part of the story for any meaningful purpose. Are we supposed to believe
that the first wife was a lhiannan shee and that the taciturn husband is a bard
who lures the second wife into his fairy tale world? Was there a child in the
first marriage? What happened to it? Nothing really seems to justify all this.
And nothing seems to suggest that such a transition from the real world into a
magical world really signifies anything.

It is not enough, it seems to me, that stories are interesting in their
various parts. They must be unified in
such a way that they coherently signify something about the human condition.

Tuesday, September 5, 2017

Back in the day when short stories were popular in America (yes, there
was such a time, during the forties and fifties, when a lot of people read
short stories and writers could even make a decent living writing them), there
were two kinds of short stories: relatively
simple, plot-based commercial stories featuring everyday people caught in
common dilemmas, and relatively complex language-based literary stories
featuring everyday people caught in subtle,
hard-to understand dilemmas.

There are not so many of these popular, commercial, plot-based, simple
stories—either pulp or slick--in America anymore—television and now the
Internet having largely taken their place, providing entertaining,
non-challenging, time-passing, simple stories. The short story in America today,
in the relatively few places it appears in print, is largely “literary.”
Occasionally, a simple, straightforward storyteller will appear and get a bit of buzz,
but not often. People don’t read short
stories for entertainment very much in America any more.

However, it may very well be that people still read short stories for
entertainment, or listen to them on the radio, in Great Britain. And it may also very well be that some of
these simple, straightforward, plot-based stories, might be considered very
good stories, even among the “best” stories published in print or heard on BBC4
in a given year.

I suspect that Nicholas Royle, editor of Best British Short Stories, 2017, was mindful thathe not only had to choose the “best”
stories of the year, but also to create a book with some variety that would
appeal to as many readers as possible. Consequently, of the twenty stories he
chose, some had to be simple and straightforward, with clear, transparent prose
and enough background explanatory context to be easily accessible to the
reader, while others were inevitably elliptical and puzzling, drawing attention
to the language itself, experimenting with form, and refusing to help the
reader understand the significance of the story.

I suggest that the following four stories are of the first type: relatively
conventional, primarily based on straightforward plot and character, pleasingly
accessible to a wide range of readers.
It is not surprising that two of the four first appeared on BBC4, for if
a story is going to be read on the radio and listened to by a broad audience,
it usually must be understood on the first reading/hearing, since this first
encounter may be the only one the listener/reader will have—no pausing to
ponder over the language, no second reading to allow the ending to clarify the
beginning.

Peter Bradshaw’s “Reunion
“is an old fashioned story that exists primarily for the “surprise “ending—a form
so popular that, at least in America, it once was the norm for the commercial
short story. The first person point of view is that of a man named Eliot who is
trying to “work something out” about the events of the past twenty-four hours
while attending a conference at a hotel. He provides some context, largely
irrelevant, that he has been in love three times in his life: once with his
mistress, once with his ex-wife, and once, when he was eleven, with an
eleven-year-old named Lucy Venables. He then “recalls” for the reader the night
before when he went out for a smoke and sees a woman whose name tag reads “Dr. Venables.
Recognizing her as his childhood love Lucy, he recalls when he met her and she
invited him in for a Carona lemonade. After falling deeply in love with her, he
asked her for a kiss.

Lucy sets up a test for Eliot to earn the kiss, positioning her little sister Chloe up against a shed
door, drawing an outline around her about twelve inches distant from her body
and challenging Eliot to throw three darts inside the outline without hitting
Chloe. He succeeds in the first two throws but his clumsy third throw makes
Chloe flinch and the dart goes in her ear. The father comes out and smacks
Eliot, sending him home crying.

We flash back to the adult encounter, with Dr. Venables inviting Eliot
to her room to get the kiss he never got when they were eleven. As he pulls her
clothes off, she gasps, “O Elliot,” call me by my name. Say my name.” He sweeps
up her hair to kiss her neck, which reveals her injured ear, and “complies with
her request” saying, “Chloe.” When we flash back to the opening of the story,
the man at reception asks Eliot if he would like a drink from the bar. The last
line of the story is: “I think I shall ask for a Corona lemonade.”

As you can see from this synopsis, you don’t need to hear it or read it
again. The story is quite conventional, giving the reader a wry smile at the little surprise at the end. There is even
a bit of poetic justice—the kind of justice that surprise ending stories used
to specialize in—for it seems only fair that Chloe should be the “target of
Eliot’s love, the one who took the risk, got injured, and coincidently shows up
years later to rightfully fulfill the promise of the kiss.

Niven Govinden’s “Waves” was
commissioned by BBC4 for a series of stories about sleep and rest. BBC4 listeners knew this assignment context when
they first heard the story on the radio; thus primed, they could listen to listen
for how the story actually explores the importance of sleep and rest. However, readers of the story in this book,
not knowing that the story was written to fulfill a thematic specification, may
not be sure what point the story has. All the reader knows is that a man is in
a hospital dreaming that he is surfing in Hawaii. The primary emphasis, aside
from the assigned dream/rest theme, is that the man is growing older and
lamenting his lost youth, strength, and power. A central sentence is:

“Far greater than his pride
is his impatience to demonstrate strength or knowledge with those a generation
or more behind him, and how this grows with age. The swagger of young manhood a tipping point
for his antagonism, which shrinks as his waistline swells.”

The doctors tell him he must rest, suggesting that rest and sleep cures
all—that the real work of healing is something like magic, that sleep holds a
promise of recuperation. However, he feels “useless and old” and longs for
those days in the past when a combination of authority and pure heft could
right things. Although Govinden’s story is well written, it seems a bit too
much like an MFA workshop assignment.

Laura Pocock’s “The Dark
Instruments” is a “Twilight Zone” type story, in which a guy builds a model
of his town; when a neighbor sees the model one night, he discovers that one of
the model houses that is burned is a replica of an actual house that burned a
year ago.

There is something here about connection between artifice and reality,
but the problem is that it is not clear
which comes first—the model or the actuality.
Which causes which? The first clue is the broken church window of one of
the models, which mirrors a real church window that has been vandalized. The key word in the story is “coincidence.”
The issue is: how do the two things coincide?

The man wonders if he can show his neighbor the town without revealing
its secret. But the reader does not know
what the secret is. And we don’t know what it has to do with the fact that the
builder was injured when he was in the army—a gunshot wound to the knee.—an
injury that has no physical basis. Is this a post-traumatic stress syndrome
story in which the breaks the church window and burns down the house as a way
to control reality? We just don’t know. We just know that some kind of sympathetic
magic seems to be going on in the commercially successful world of the twilight
zone.

Lara Williams’ “Treats” is a
simple, genre-style “woman’s” story about Elaine, a 50-year-old woman who says
she was made for menopause, a woman whose husband used to treat her, but now
her treats are reserved for her birthday.

Elaine likes to perform secret good deeds and sometimes imagines secret
good deeds being done for her. The title comes from the notion of treats or
gifts, like the ones she used to get from her husband, but now they are
reserved only for her birthday.

She has no children, only a solitary goldfish. She is often
disappointed. Her boss points to a brown
parcel on her birthday and says “that’s for you,” but when Elaine thinks it is
a gift and starts unwrapping it, the boss says, “What are you doing? That needs couriering. Tonight.”

Then her husband cancels taking her to the movies, so
she goes alone and treats herself to popcorn and a hotdog and “her heart did a
little leap on its own; you could do that, to your heart, you could be so kind
to yourself you could make your own heart leap.”

The last line of the story is: “After all, she
thought, what goes around comes around.”

I have been able to find only two reviews of Best British Short Stories 2017 on Internet
websites; both like “Treats.” Tamim Sadihali on Bookmunch calls “Treats” pretty much short story perfection.” And Eleanor Franzen on Litro says it is her favorite story in the book and that she has “no
trouble at all in believing that it’s among the best British short stories of
the year.”

It’s a pleasant story, written in likeable language about a likeable
character. Once you read an opening sentence like the following, you are well
disposed to take pleasure in the rest:

“It was one of those
sneaky summer days, one that lounges around a chilled August, making a wild and
unpredictable cameo, hoodwinking you into knits, swindling you out of sandals.”

You have to like someone who writes in such a facile way as Williams,
just as you have to like the central character, Elaine, who at age fifty, feels
she was made to protect and watch over people. But to suggest that this is “short
story perfection” and that you have no trouble believing it’s one of the best
stories written in Great Britain in 2017 may be to underestimate the short
story as a form.

Next time I will talk about some more challenging stories in Best British Short Stories 2017 that
move from realism to magical realism.

Friday, September 1, 2017

I would like to make a couple of prefatory points about yearly
collections of short stories that label themselves “Best of” before I begin my discussion
of the 2017 editions of the three best-known such anthologies: Best British Short Stories, Best American Short Stories, and O. Henry Prize Stories.

First of all, you probably already know that such collections seldom
get reviewed in the big circulation newspapers, e.g. New York Times, Washington
Post, Guardian, etc. Why is that?

One of the reasons is that book review editors do not want to waste
space on works of fiction that have been previously published in periodicals. They want something new and newsworthy.
Previously published stories are, after all, not really news at all.

Moreover, whereas reviewers can focus on some unifying theme or style
when reviewing a collection of stories by a single author, they find talking
about twenty different stories by twenty different authors a daunting task, and
editors just don’t want to use precious space on unfocused thumbnail notices.

The best a reviewer can do is to try to find some “trend” in a
collection of what is presented as the “best” stories in a given year. And let’s face it, short stories are just not
trendy—at least not since Raymond Carver.
And if some promising young author suddenly appears, editors and reviewers
will wait until a publisher brings out a whole book of stories by said author
and pumps enough money in promotion for readings, interviews, adverts, and
NPR/BBC appearances to give book review editors and reviewers a news “story.”

I could go on about this for some time; indeed, I have gone on about
this for some time—at least for forty years of my career as a professor/critic.
But enough whining.

The second prefatory point I want to make has to do with the issue of “Best
of.” Says who? What makes a story one of
the “best” twenty stories published in a given year? Who decides and on what
basis does that judge decide?

I won’t go into the history of the top three “best of” collections. The Best American Short Stories has been
around for over a hundred years. And since
1978, each issue has had a series editor and a guest editor. The series editor is now Heidi Pitlor, who,
she says, reads thousands of stories every year and then picks 120 of those she
considers the “best.” She then turns
those over to a guest editor—always a fiction writer—who then chooses those he
or she thinks are the best twenty stories, which then appear in the yearly
volume, usually in the fall of the year.

The O. Henry Prize Stories,
which has been around almost as long as BASS
(1919), has one editor only—currently Laura Furman—who chooses all twenty
stories in the yearly volume and then sends them to three different fiction
writers who choose their favorite and write a brief essay about it that appears
at the end of the volume.

The new kid on the
block is Best British Short Stories,
now in its seventh year, which is edited by Nicholas Royle, who chooses all
twenty stories in each yearly collection. (There once was a series called Best English Short Stories that ran for about
ten years between 1986 and 1995, edited by Giles Gordon and David Hughes.)

One of the main
problems the editor of these three volumes must face, that is, beyond the task
of trying to read every short story published in America, Canada, or England in
a given year, is balancing between choosing what he or she thinks are the very
best stories out of all the stories published, and then making a book out of
them. The two demands are often not the
same.

Choosing the “best”
stories necessitates, we assume, some understanding and appreciation not only
of fiction in general, but the unique characteristics of the short story in
particular. It does not necessitate, we assume, depending on personal taste,
obsession, or author collegiality. It means choosing the very “best.”

However, making a
book out of twenty stories depends on giving the reader some variety. I mean, the editor would risk alienating his
or her reader were he to choose twenty stories that were all similarly
realistic or surrealistic, experimental, traditional, etc., even if he or she
thought those were the very “best” stories he or she had read that year.

I have read all
twenty stories in this year’s Best
British Short Stories twice, as I always do, and I find that Nicholas Royle
has, as he has in the first six volumes (all of which I have discussed on this
blog), put together a book with a variety of different kinds of short stories.
I cannot make a judgment on Royle’s judgment that these twenty stories are the “best”
published in England this year. No one
can second guess Royle on this matter, for, I would wager, no one has read as
many British stories as he has this year, and consequently no one is able to
make the kind of comparative judgments he has.

However, during the
month of September, I will offer some opinions about the stories in Best British Short Stories 2017 —what kind
of stories they are, how significant they seem to be, how well they appear to
be written, and what might conceivably have earned them a place as among the “best”
stories published in England this past year. In some cases I might even say, “surely
not,” and try to justify my judgment.

During the month of
October, I will try to do the same for O.
Henry Prize Stories: 2017, and during the month of November, I will make
comments on the stories chosen for Best
American Short Stories: 2017.

Reality of Artifice

New Short Story Theories

Followers

About Me

Born and raised in the mountains of Eastern Kentucky. Received B.A. from Morehead State University in 1963; M.A. from Ohio University in 1964; Ph.D. from Ohio University in 1966. Taught at California State University, Long Beach from 1967 to 2007. Retired and currently writing and blogging.

Dubliners Centenial

One hundred years ago, the great collection of stories Dubliners by James Joyce appeared. If you are interested in my comments on that collection, see my posts in April 2012 when the book was featured in Dublin's "One City, One Book."